The Swiss and 'their' nobel My Swiss neighbours have always had very special relationship with the ‚man’…
Take for example his publisher Egon Ammann in Zurich, who is really a great story-teller. For years he has been telling the story how he ‚discovered that young African writer’. If we are to believe Egon - who is a great believer in the Italian adage of ‘se non é vero, é ben racontato’ – he was one day waiting for his plane at Heathrow aiport. He watches a good-looking young African with a fat wad of manuscript pages leafing through it and finally throwing it into a waste-paper basket. And the very moment that young African made for his departure gate Egon dived into the waste-paper basket to dig out those type-written pages.
And what did he discover? The script of a brilliant book which he later published. It was the script of AKE...
Fact is that some time around 1983 or so together with a Swiss friend I managed to convince Wole to say bye to his half-a-dozen different German publishers and stay forthwith with one and only publisher, Egon Ammann of Zurich. AKE was published in 1984, that is wo years before the Nobel. And then comes along the Nobel and Egon is a happy publisher: he sells no less than 15.000 copies within four weeks.
And Egon has friend, who is working for the Swiss Justice Department in Zurich. As such he is also responsible for some 20 Nigerian detainees, smallish drug traders, who have been in their cells for quite some time altready and who are ‘quite demoralised’. “Et pour leur remonter le moral“, as they say in Switzerland’s second official language, in French, Egon and his friend order twenty copies of a poster with Wole’s ‚impressive head’ (quote from H.J. Rosenbauer, former German TV director, who visisted Wole’s house on the Ife Campus in 1983), the posters to decorate the Zurich prison cells of the drug-pushers. And then Egon also orders ten copies of the English version of Ake with Wole’s London publisher Rex Collings - so as to ‘promote Yoruba selfesteem’ among the detainees.
I decide to tell Wole, who is in the US, about this, and he seems to have appreciated that initiative by his new publisher, who is dying to at long last meet his author and idol in person, “even if only for half an hour!”. But the ‘man’ is nowhere to be found. I start sending letters to Cornell and the Campus Store there to please transmit to the ‚man’. At long last Wole ‘gives me a phone’, as the Swiss say, when they mean to say they give you a call...
Yes, we can meet in Paris the following month: „But not for half an hour! No, for Lunch or Dinner with the usual Rouge.”
There have many meetings since, though sometimes the relationship went a little bit sour (see above story on what the publisher did to ‘Ibadan’.)
And then there was this other Swiss enthusiast of African literature, who for several decades did a marvelous job in promoting African literature in the German-speaking world, but then somehow over-estimated his own doings by pretending that ‘in 1985 and 1986 I have used all my connections in Sweden so that Wole would get the PRIZE.”
As far as I am concerned, I don’t know ‘any influential Swedes’... And no matter how the Swedes took their decision that Swiss enthusiast’s official biographer later put the record straight when she wrote:
“In 1986 was the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. And althoughthis was entirely and only due to his own efforts, as his agent in the German-speaking world Gerd Meuer insists, all those who have shown interest in African literature and helped to sponsor it can rightfully be proud of the recognition of Soyinka’s work”.
End of quote. Nicely, tongue-in-cheekly worded, but somehow also factually wrong. Because, first: I can NOT remember ever having talked to anybody that the ‘man must get the Prize’. Far from it! But ever since my days as a student in Ibadan in 1962 I was fully convinced that he would GET it, and that in the not too distant future! Proof? See the following story: “Like da same“.
And two: the author of these lines has never been ‘Wole’s ‘agent in the German-speaking world’. He never ever received an agent’s percentage but rather gets beaten – if only verbally on the phone, by fax and e-mail - when he tells would-be organizers of the ‘most important literary event in Germany, Austria or Switzerland’ that the ‘man’ is really NOT available for their ridiculous event or for the ridiculous fee the organizers dare to offer.
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